Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."

That's the general problem with Linux distribution model which puts all the burden of integration testing on distributors . This obviously blurs responsibility of respective components maintainers giving way to demonstrated responsibility shifting between teams working on different layers.

In closed environments making sure hardware works is a sole responsibility of the driver creator, who in turn can count on assuming relatively stable set of HW/driver interactions secured by stable OS middleware. In linux the middleware/ driver api is in constant flux. That invalidates any testing efforts between even minor releases.
Integrating those pieces into relatively stable coherent whole across wide range of HW/SW combinations (as required by desktop linux) is mission impossible.
That's (among others) why Linux have failed there while it thrives in more controlled environments (phones, appliances, servers, etc.) where testing is at least manageable.